March 8, 2012

A little tale to tease our thoughts...



Willis Eschenbach pulls a fast one to make a point which I suspect is valid. Under the radar - the NAS Report | Watts Up With That? This is the end of his piece, so it's a spoiler. Sorry...

...Now, why is the speed of a Cray-1 computer relevant to the NAS report I quoted from above?

It is relevant because as some of you may have realized, the NAS report I quoted from above is called the "Charney Report". As far as I know, it was the first official National Academy of Science statement on the CO2 question. And when I said it was a "recent report", I was thinking about it in historical terms. It was published in 1979.

Here's the bizarre part, the elephant in the climate science room. The Charney Report could have been written yesterday. AGW supporters are still making exactly the same claims, as if no time had passed at all. For example, AGW supporters are still saying the same thing about the clouds now as they were back in 1979—they admit they don't understand them, that it's the biggest problem in the models, but all the same but they're sure the net feedback is positive. I'm not sure clear that works, but it's been that way since 1979.

That's the oddity to me—when you read the Charney Report, it is obvious that almost nothing of significance has changed in the field since 1979. There have been no scientific breakthroughs, no new deep understandings. People are still making the same claims about climate sensitivity, with almost no change in the huge error limits. The range still varies by a factor of three, from about 1.5 to about 4.5°C per doubling of CO2....

How can we understand this stupendous lack of progress, a third of a century of intensive work with very little to show for it?

For me, there is only one answer. The lack of progress means that there is some fundamental misunderstanding at the very base of the modern climate edifice. It means that the underlying paradigm that the whole field is built on must contain some basic and far-reaching theoretical error...
Posted by John Weidner at March 8, 2012 9:06 AM
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